Every LLM agent framework does stop-the-world compaction when context fills — pause, summarize, resume. The agent freezes, the user waits, and the post-compaction agent wakes up with a lossy summary.
You can avoid this with double buffering. At ~70% capacity, summarize into a checkpoint and start a back buffer. Keep working. Append new messages to both. When the active context hits the wall, swap. The new context has compressed old history + full-fidelity recent messages.
Same single summarization call you'd make anyway, just earlier — when the model isn't at the attention cliff. 40-year-old technique (graphics, databases, stream processing). Nobody had applied it to LLM context. Worst case degrades to exactly today's status quo.
mlubin01•1h ago
You can avoid this with double buffering. At ~70% capacity, summarize into a checkpoint and start a back buffer. Keep working. Append new messages to both. When the active context hits the wall, swap. The new context has compressed old history + full-fidelity recent messages.
Same single summarization call you'd make anyway, just earlier — when the model isn't at the attention cliff. 40-year-old technique (graphics, databases, stream processing). Nobody had applied it to LLM context. Worst case degrades to exactly today's status quo.